Law Commons^™

Who Owns Our Ancestors Voices? Tribal Claims To Pre-72 Sound Recordings, Trevor Reed

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

A familiar story is told in Indian Country: a researcher arrives on a Native American reservation and begins recording ceremonial songs and oral histories; years later tribal members find, often to their horror, that these sensitive materials are available for sale, download, or streaming to the public. This scenario aptly describes the life of numerous sound recordings made on federally recognized Indian reservations prior to 1972, whose ownership status remains uninterrogated due to the complex overlap and ambiguities of copyright and federal Indian law. Yet recently, owing to an increased sense of self-determination and autonomy, Native American tribes have begun …